Note that the arguments 3 & 4 above are in double quotes as there’s a space within the timestamp value. Without the double-quotes, sqlplus would think the script has total 6 arguments due to the spaces.

I don’t like to type too much though (every character counts!) so I was happy to see that the following sqlplus hack works. I just defined pairs of arguments as sqlplus DEFINE variables as seen below (also in init.sql now):

Here are the slides of a presentation I did at the IOUG Virtual Exadata conference in February. I’m explaining the basics of some new Oracle 12c things related to Exadata, plus current latest cellsrv improvements like Columnar Flash Cache and IO skipping for Min/Max retrieval using Storage Indexes:

Note that Christian Antognini and Roger MacNicol have written separate articles about some new features:

This is the first entry in a series of random articles about some useful internals-to-know of the awesome Oracle Database In-Memory column store. I intend to write about Oracle’s IM stuff that’s not already covered somewhere else and also about some general CPU topics (that are well covered elsewhere, but not always so well known in the Oracle DBA/developer world).

There’s a lot of talk about the use of your CPUs’ SIMD vector processing capabilities in the Oracle inmemory module, let’s start by checking if it’s enabled in your database at all. We’ll look into Linux/Intel examples here.

This is a panel where Andy Colvin, Kerry Osborne and I will discuss what has changed in Exadata since writing the 1st edition of the Expert Oracle Exadata book (yes, we are working on the 2nd edition, stay tuned!)

In this presentation Kerry and I will walk you through the performance differences when swithching from an old DW/reporting system (on a crappy I/O subsystem) all the way to having your data cached in Oracle’s In-Memory Column Store – with all the Oracle 12.1.0.2’s performance bells and whistles enabled. It will be awesome – see you there! ;-)

If a car dealer tells you that this fancy new car on display goes 10 times (or 100 or 1000) faster than any of your previous ones, then either the salesman is lying or this new car is doing something radically different from all the old ones. You don’t just get orders of magnitude performance improvements by making small changes.

Perhaps the car bends space around it instead of moving – or perhaps it has a jet engine built on it (like the one below :-) :

Enkitec folks have been beta testing the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option over the past months and recently the Oracle guys interviewed Kerry Osborne, Cary Millsap and me to get our opinions. In short, this thing rocks!

We can’t talk much about the technical details before Oracle 12.1.0.2 is officially out in July, but here’s the recorded interview that got published at Oracle website as part of the In-Memory launch today:

I might actually be even more excited about the In-Memory Option than I was excited about Exadata years ago. The In-Memory Option is not just a performance feature, it’s a simplifying feature too. So, now it’s ok to kill your performance problem with hardware, as long as you use it in a smart way :-)

Here’s a little known feature of Exadata – you can use a Bloom filter computed from a join column of a table to skip disk I/Os against another table it is joined to. This not the same as the Bloom filtering of the datablock contents in Exadata storage cells, but rather avoiding reading in some storage regions from the disks completely.

So, you can use storage indexes to skip I/Os against your large fact table, based on a bloom filter calculated from a small dimension table!

This is useful especially for dimensional star schemas, as your SQL statements might not have direct predicates on your large fact tables at all, all results will be determined by looking up relevant dimension records and then performing a hash join to the fact table (whether you should have some direct predicates against the fact tables, for performance reasons, is a separate topic for some other day :-)

Let me show an example using the SwingBench Order Entry schema. The first output is from Oracle 11.2.0.3 BP21 on Cellsrv 12.1.1.1.0:

Enkitec is the best consulting firm for hands on implementation, running and troubleshooting your Oracle based systems, especially the engineered systems like Exadata. We have a truly awesome group of people here; many are the best in their field (just look at the list!!!).

We all are now part of Accenture and this opens up a whole lot of new opportunities. I think this is BIG, and I will explain how I see the future (sorry, no Oracle Database internals in this post ;-)

In my opinion the single most important detail of this transaction is that both Enkitec and the folks at Accenture realize that the reason Enkitec is so awesome is that awesome techies want to work here. And we don’t just want to keep it that way – we must keep it that way!

The Enkitec group will not be dissolved into the Accenture. If it were, we would disappear, like a drop in the ocean and Accenture would have lost its investment. Instead we will remain an island in the ocean continuing to provide expert help for our existing and new customers – and in long term help Accenture build additional capability for the massive projects of their customers.

We will not have ten thousand people in our group. Instead we will continue hiring (and retaining) people exactly the way we’ve been – organic growth by having only the best, likeminded people. The main difference is, now with Accenture behind us, we can hire the best people globally, as we’ll have operations in over 50 countries. I understand that we won’t likely even double in size in the next few years – as we plan to stick to hiring only the best.

I think we will have a much, much wider reach now, showing how to do Oracle technology “our way” all around the world. With Accenture behind us, we will be navigating through even larger projects in larger businesses, influencing things earlier and more. And on a more personal note, I’m looking forward to all those 10 rack Exadata and 100TB In-Memory DB Option performance projects ;-)

There are a few interesting MOS articles about these files and how/when to get rid of those (don’t remove any files before reading the notes!), but none of these articles explain why these JOXSHM (and PESHM) files are needed at all: